Levelling up: can Boris keep his £2trn promise?

Remember “Big Society”? It was a phrase beloved of David Cameron when he was prime minister.

Few people knew what it meant, although the words sounded good. Significantly, hardly anyone in government apart from Cameron repeated them and over time the declared aim was quietly shelved.

In similar fashion, Boris Johnson has made “levelling up” a plank of his domestic policy agenda. Already, it’s achieved something that “Big Society” never did, yielding seats for the Tories in the Midlands and North.

Ah yes, but is it any more real? Is “levelling up” also destined for the scrapheap of broken electoral promises?

Johnson will say “phooey” or some such, in that inimitable style of his. Certainly, “levelling up” is displaying more legs than the Cameron scheme. It’s been trotted out by more of Johnson’s colleagues; MPs, especially those who owe their jobs to it, repeatedly point to government measures or ideas as being part of the “levelling up agenda”. 

It’s got greater resonance; its meaning is widely accepted. Or is it? Rishi Sunak said moving part of the Treasury workforce to a new, purpose-built site in Darlington showed just how serious the administration was about levelling up.

This, while the Prime Minister makes a speech explaining what he believes levelling up means. “A woman from York has on average a decade longer of healthy life expectancy than a woman from Doncaster,” said Johnson. And: “Why should income per head in Monmouthshire be 50 per cent higher than in Blaenau Gwent?” He continued: “Why do “two-thirds of graduates from our top 30 universities end up in London”?

Gulp. It’s difficult to see how the shunting of a clutch of civil servants to the North-East even begins to display intent about tackling that lot. Sunak, of course, is sticking to what is achievable and affordable; Johnson, as is his wont, is clutching at something altogether loftier and grander.

Now the numbers have been crunched and they must make even Johnson wish he’d not been so cavalier. According to the Centre for Cities think tank, in summary, to achieve levelling up will require a similar level of funding to the reunification of Germany, £2 trillion or thereabouts. The non-partisan body said that the moves announced so far were a “drop in the ocean” and closing the north-south divide would swallow hundreds of billions of pounds over decades, if done properly.

That last, if done properly, could be seized upon by Johnson. He may choose to deliver “levelling up lite”, a series of wheezes like relocating a section of the Treasury from London (nothing wrong with it, by the way, but what, in practice will the “Northern Campus” really amount to?).

To ram home their message, Centre for Cities also offered comparisons on life expectancy, as Johnson did, but this time with locations in Europe – so the average person in Madrid can expect to live 10 years longer than someone in Glasgow or Liverpool.

The problem is that Johnson is the one who won the general election – he was believed. No one in those former “red wall” constituencies thought for a second he was referring only to putting Treasury wonks in offices in Darlington and the like.

This is already becoming clear. There are stirrings from unlikely quarters in those very places he wooed, and they should make Johnson sit up and take notice. James Ramsbotham, CEO of North-East England Chamber of Commerce and a former Barclays Bank executive and son of the ex-army general, David Ramsbotham – not someone you would suppose naturally inclined to oppose the Tories – has written to the Prime Minister complaining about a lack of strategic planning. He charges: “This government has broken the traditional link between the Conservative party and business.”

Ramsbotham, who is quitting as the chamber’s chief executive after 15 years to become chair of Newcastle Building Society, says that Brexit has not helped. “Hitachi bought a site in the north-east with a view to building trains for the whole of Europe. The place was big enough for three factories, but they have only built one and the rest of the land is vacant. If you want to see where the trains are going to be made for the EU, you’ll need to visit Hitachi’s new factory in Italy.”

In the West Midlands, the region’s newly re-elected Tory mayor, Andy Street, has called upon Johnson to match the symbolism of levelling up with “concrete policies”. Street, also a businessman as the former head of John Lewis, is seeking a “full policy platform” from the Prime Minister in the coming months.

He’s heartened by the fact that so far, Johnson has exhibited no sign of reversing on levelling up but cautions that those voters who turned to the Tories in Midlands and North “want to see delivery”. He’s demanding “reconciliation” between those in government who advocate high public spending, such as Johnson, and those who prefer a restrained approach, like Sunak. One solution as well, he says, is to involve the private sector, to encourage greater corporate investment.

These are warnings for Johnson. He can ignore them, but he does so at his peril. While he may be cut some slack for Covid, that crisis might now be ending or at least waning. That will turn the spotlight on the economy, on national issues, on the initiatives the government is taking, and said it would take, that have nothing to do with combating the virus.

Johnson has raised expectancy; by blandishing such a sweeping term over and over, the bar is high. It secured him an unlikely rout at the ballot box; but now words like “delivery” and “concrete policies” are being used, and not by his opponents but by his own followers.

This is dangerous territory. Does he allow levelling up to wither, as occurred with Big Society? Does he begin to water down its meaning, to an objective that is achievable, a policy that can be built around and is manageable? Or does he carry on, blithely claiming, among other things, he wants to enable folk to live longer?

Awkward questions. As we head into conference season, the natives are getting restless. The clock is ticking on the answer.